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The silence at the Bastion Compound is a physical thing. It presses in on the facility’s sleek walls, a presence so profound it feels like another teammate. The halls should have been empty for another week, the cats who normally prowl them banished to their homes to tend to their private aches before they are expected to reform together as a whole.
Red Eye has been here for three days, and the silence has learned the shape of his name.
He is in the garage. The air is cold, smells of oil and ozone and something else, something metallic and old, like blood. He is standing in front of his car, its polished shell reflecting the room in long, distorted streaks. He meant to be working. He meant to recalibrate. Instead, he is just… here.
The car’s reflection shifts, and it isn’t his own face staring back. It’s a crowd, a thousand blurred faces screaming in silent adoration. The roar bypasses his ears and settles deep in his bones, a vibration that shakes him apart. He is a king on a throne of chrome. He is a god. Then the roar curdles, twists into a single, sharp note of failure. The faces in the reflection turn away, one by one. The vibration becomes a hum of disappointment. He is nothing.
He blinks, and the scent of blood sharpens, thickens. It’s coming from him. He looks down. His arm is scraped raw, the skin angry and split, blood tacky where it has begun to dry. He doesn’t remember getting injured.
He blinks, and he is in the locker room. The transition is a jolt, a sickening lurch without any movement. One moment he is in the garage, the scent of oil and ozone in his nose; the next, he is here, the air heavier, thick with the ghosts of things left unsaid.
Red Eye is standing in front of his locker, but the metal is dented and warped. A long, deep scratch runs down the door, like a claw mark. When he reaches out to touch it, his fingers don’t feel the cold metal. He feels the jarring, sickening impact of being trapped. He feels the weight of others rolling over him, one after another, a rhythmic, crushing humiliation. His own breath catches in his throat, a frantic and shallow. He is an obstacle. A speed bump. A joke.
He blinks, and the scent of blood is gone, replaced by the sharp, antiseptic smell of a medical wipe. He flinches as a clean, bright pain blooms on his arm, but there’s no one there to touch him. The pain is a memory, or a premonition, he can’t tell which anymore.
He blin-
He is in the bathroom. The air is cold and smells of bleach and soap. The only sound is the loud, aggressive hum of the ventilation fan, a sound that feels like it's trying to suck the air—and the soul—out of the room. He is standing in front of the sink, his hands gripping the cold porcelain edge. He doesn't remember washing them, but they're damp. He is forced to look at his own reflection.
But it's not his reflection.
The figure in the mirror is him, but perfected. It’s the version from the magazines, the one from his modeling days, the one from press conferences held after he won gold. He is polished to a high, glassy shine. There are no scratches, no signs of wear. His posture is perfect, his chin held at a precise, arrogant angle. He is not just handsome; he is a flawless, cold object.
And he is judging the real Red Eye.
The reflection doesn't speak. It doesn't have to. Its expression is a withering, silent critique. Its eyes, cold and calculating, sweep over the real Red Eye's trembling form, his pallor, the haunted look in his eyes. The reflection's lip curls in a microscopic sneer of disgust. It is looking at a failure, a cheap, broken imitation.
Red Eye feels a deep, instinctual shame. He wants to look away, but he can't. He is frozen, trapped by the gaze of his own idealized self. He feels the phantom weight of a photographer's hand on his chin, forcing his head up, adjusting the angle. ‘No. Not that one. The one they want. The one that sells.’
He lifts a hand to touch his own face, to feel the warmth of his own skin. But the reflection doesn't move. It remains a perfect, untouchable statue, its hands resting elegantly on the edge of the sink. The disconnect is absolute. He is the flawed, living original. The reflection is the perfect, dead copy. And the copy is winning.
The hum of the fan seems to get louder, the light brighter, and the cold, judgmental stare of the man in the mirror is the only thing that's real.
He blinks.
He is in the common room. The wide windows show nothing but mist, a solid wall of white that swallows the world outside. He is standing in the center of the room, but the floor feels soft and spongy, warped. It groans under his weight. The angles of the furniture are all wrong, like someone rebuilt the space from a faulty memory. The couch is too long. The table is too low.
A voice is speaking, but it’s not coming from a person. It’s coming from the walls. From the floor. From the air itself.
‘You don’t even care, do you?’ the room says. It’s Yellow Eye’s voice, but it’s everywhere at once. The floors. The ceilings. The windows. ‘You won. Great. Another photo-op. Another chance to be the face.’
He wants to argue. He wants to say that’s not true. But his mouth won't form the words. His jaw is locked, his tongue useless.
‘Did you even see my race? Did you even notice I was gone?’
The room presses in. The couch leans toward him, a silent accuser. The table’s surface ripples like water. He feels the memory of a sharp, careless word leaving his mouth, feels the way it landed like a shard of glass between them. He feels the weight of Yellow Eye’s hurt, a physical presence in the room that’s heavier than he is. The air grows thick, and Red Eye suddenly finds it hard to breathe.
He blinks, and he is in the kitchen. The air is cold, carrying the faint, clean scent of lemons and bleach, a smell that tries to cover up the sterile chill. He is standing in front of the open refrigerator, the blue-white light painting him in a cold, clinical glow. He isn’t hungry. He hasn’t eaten in days. The very thought of food is alien, repellent. The emptiness in his stomach is a dull, familiar ache he mistakes for control.
His eyes are drawn to the counter. Where a kitchen scale should be, a heavy, industrial-looking scale sits instead, the kind they use to weigh athletes for official inspection. It gleams under the light, an accusation that doesn't need words to communicate its meaning.
Red Eye feels a pull, an invisible string drawing him toward it. He knows he shouldn't. He knows what it will say. But his feet move anyway, his bare feet silent on the cold tile. He steps onto the scale.
The digital display doesn't show numbers. It shows words.
TOO HEAVY.
The words glow red, searing themselves into his vision. He feels a phantom weight settling on him, a gravitational pull he can't fight. He feels himself getting slower, denser, clumsier. He sees the Hazers' sleek, grey forms flashing past him, their lightness a form of perfection he can no longer achieve.
‘Light is fast,’ a voice whispers. It’s not Yellow Eye's this time. It’s colder, more detached. A photographer's voice from a life he thought he’d left behind. ‘The camera adds ten pounds. We can’t have that. You need to be nothing but air and light.’
The display on the scale changes.
FAILURE.
The word pulses in time with the hum of the refrigerator. The light from above seems to intensify, burning down on him, exposing every flaw. He feels the eyes of a dozen journalists on him, their lenses like unblinking, judgmental eyes. He isn't a captain. He isn't a racer. He's just a product that’s past its expiration date.
He stumbles back off the scale, his breath catching in a sharp gasp. The cold tile of the kitchen floor seems to suck the heat from his body. He feels dizzy, faint. The emptiness in his stomach is no longer a sign of control; it's a void, a chasm that's opening up inside him, and it's threatening to swallow him whole.
He blinks, and the air is thin again, cold. He can taste the rain on his tongue, metallic and sharp. He is back in the garage, standing in front of his car. He should be working. He should be recalibrating. Instead, he is just… here.
The car’s reflection shifts. It isn’t his own face staring back. It’s a crowd, a thousand blurred faces screaming in silent adoration. The roar bypasses his ears and settles deep in his bones, a vibration that shakes him apart. He is a king on a throne of chrome. He is a god. Then the roar curdles, twists into a single, sharp note of failure. The faces in the reflection turn away, one by one. The vibration becomes a hum of disappointment. He is nothing.
The loop is seamless. He doesn't notice the jump. He doesn't feel the transition. One moment he is drowning in a teammate’s misplaced anger, the next he is soaring on a phantom crowd’s roar, the next he is being judged for a weight he can’t see. He is a king. He is a joke. He is a failure. He is a ghost. He is too much. He is not enough.
(He is never, ever enough)
The rain starts again, a slow, dissolving drizzle that scrapes at the glass. Tap. Tap. Tap. A scalpel to the memory.
He is in the bathroom. The man in the mirror is perfect, and his silent disgust is the only thing that's real.
He is in the kitchen. The blue light of the refrigerator spills out. The scale on the counter glows red: TOO HEAVY.
He is in the locker room. The metal is dented, warped. He feels the rhythmic, crushing weight of others rolling over him. His breath catches, frantic and shallow.
He is in the common room. The angles are all wrong. The room is speaking to him in Yellow Eye’s voice.
‘You were the problem,’ the room whispers, and the words crawl in behind his ribs and settle there, acidic and absolute. ‘You were in the way.’
He blinks.
He is in the garage.
The loop is his reality now. Past and present are a smeared watercolor. The ghosts have taken up residence, and he is just the space they occupy. The rain continues its slow, deliberate work outside, and inside, the failures replay, over and over, each one leaving him a little more hollow, a little heavier, a little more lost than before.
He doesn’t know how long he stands there, letting the memories replay on a loop he can no longer distinguish from his own thoughts. The silence outside the loop acts as a physical pressure, and the desert air seeping through the window seals is cold against his skin.
He’s so lost in the replay, in the dull ache of his own past stupidity, that he doesn’t hear the door.
He doesn’t hear the footsteps.
He only feels the shift.
The air in the room changes. It’s a subtle thing, a sudden charge, a disturbance in the heavy stillness. The hum of the facility’s ancient cooling system seems to quiet. The mist outside the window seems to still. The room’s voice, mid-sentence, falters and fades, like a radio signal suddenly lost.
Red Eye slowly turns his head.
Yellow Eye is standing just inside the doorway, his travel bag slung over one shoulder. He’s looking not at Red Eye, but at the empty space where the voice was, his brow furrowed in confusion. Yellow Eye feels it, too, then. The sudden, strange silence in the room. It is a Felynia thing, after all, that sensitivity to the world's thin places. Red Eye has breathed enough life into his ghosts that the air feels disturbed, unsettled.
Yellow Eye looks at Red Eye then, really looks at him, and his expression shifts from confusion to something sharper. He sees Red Eye’s pallor, the way he’s frozen in the middle of the room, the haunted, faraway look in his eyes. He sees the empty stage.
“How long have you been here?”
Yellow Eye’s voice is real. It’s not an echo. It’s solid, cutting through the thick air with its sharp, familiar edge. It’s an accusation, but it’s also a question. It’s the most direct thing he’s said to Red Eye in months.
He doesn’t answer, can’t.
Yellow Eye’s gaze narrows further, as a flicker of something—recognition, then disbelief—crosses his face. It feels like being seen through, like all the layers of his composure have suddenly turned to glass and Yellow Eye is staring directly at the shaking, broken thing inside.
‘Look at him,’ the room whispers, a sound only Red Eye can hear. ‘He finally came to see the freak show.’
“What are you running from?” Yellow Eye asks. The question loses its sharp edge, and what's left is too raw to feel comfortable. It’s a cocktail of worry and concern and anger and… something else, something that colors his voice in all the shades of a stained-glass window.
Red Eye flinches, a full-body shudder that he can’t control. He can’t explain the ghosts. He can’t explain the phantom roar or the weight of past failures. How do you tell someone that their own anger is haunting you? That their disappointment has become a physical presence in the spaces you’re supposed to share?
He tries to find a lie, a deflection, something charming and easy. But the words won’t come. All he can manage is the truth, stripped bare and fragile.
“The noise,” Red Eye whispers, his voice cracking. He doesn't recognize his own voice, the hollowed-out sound of a madman wearing his skin. “It’s too loud.”
Yellow Eye’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t understand. Of course he doesn’t. To him, the room is silent, even if something in the air itself must hum in a sour note against his senses.
Yellow Eye drops his bag by the door with a soft thud, the sound unnaturally loud in the quiet. He takes a step into the room, his gaze sweeping the space, searching for a threat that isn’t there. Or perhaps Yellow Eye is searching for the real Red Eye—the one who is snarky and perfect and infuriatingly good at everything he does, the one whose armor never cracks. The one who lives in mirrors and chrome and has been the death keel in all the relationships Red Eye has ever dared hold near. Anything but this fragile, splintered thing that speaks in fractured sentences.
No wonder Yellow Eye is looking at him as though he’s sprouting wings like a common gargoyle.
“There’s no noise, Red Eye,” he says, his voice almost soft, an unnatural worry there that he tries so hard to hide. “It’s dead silent. You’re the only one here.”
But that’s not true, Red Eye wants to say. I’m not the only one here at all.
And on some level, Yellow Eye knows that he is right.
For a moment, Red Eye thinks Yellow Eye might do something genuinely, uncharacteristically caring. He might reach out, or say something ridiculously (and inappropriately) kind.
Instead, Yellow Eye sighs dramatically and rolls his eyes, ignoring Red Eye and pulling his cellphone out of the pocket of his team jacket. He paces for a second, then stabs a number onto the screen. It rings once, twice.
“You might want to get here quick,” he says, his voice a perfect, theatrical blend of exasperation and boredom. “He’s finally cracked and it’s as dramatic as you would expect.”
Yellow Eye glances over at Red Eye as he listens to whatever White Eye is saying on his end of the call, a flicker of real anxiety in his eyes before he masks it with a smirk.
“Yeah, that or an exorcist.”
A hysterical bubble of laughter rises in Red Eye’s throat, sharp and painful. This, at least, is familiar. The drama, the performance, the deliberate over-production of his concern. It feels like a lifeline back to reality.
But the feeling is fleeting. The foreignness of the real concern beneath it all feels wrong, a texture he doesn't recognize. They have barely spoken since the league qualifiers, the silence between them angry and brittle, and this sudden, forced intimacy is its own kind of ghost.
‘See?’ a voice whispers, slithering back into the room. It’s Yellow Eye’s voice, but not his. It’s the echo, the poison. ‘Even when he tries to care, it’s a joke. You’re a joke.’
The familiar weight of it settles back into his bones, heavy and absolute. The room takes on a hazy hue, the air growing thick and smoggy, like a toxic fog rolling in from the track. It wraps around him, choking, a presence that slips across his tongue and smothers his lungs until his own thoughts feel slow and cloudy. The roar in his ears isn't a roar at all; it's the profound, deafening silence of the crowd, their disappointment so total it has erased all sound. It’s a greater condemnation than any scream.
All he can taste is ash and starvation, and for one terrifying moment, he forgets how to swallow, how to breathe, his own body a traitor trying to consume him from the inside out.
Then, a flicker of sharp, sudden pain on his forehead.
He blinks, and the smoke vanishes. The silence in his head snaps. He is back in the room. The air is clear. The light from the window is just mist-grey and weak. Yellow Eye is standing right in front of him, his phone gone, his expression a storm of anger and fear. He’s so close Red Eye can see the frantic pulse beating in his neck.
“That better not be my voice you’re hearing, arsehole,” Yellow Eye snarls, his finger still raised from where he flicked him. “Because if it is…”
The threat hangs in the air, something sharp that quickly goes blunt. Red Eye watches the fight drain out of Yellow Eye, like a flame being suddenly extinguished. His shoulders slacken as he runs a hand through his hair, a gesture of pure, helpless frustration Red Eye has seen a hundred times before, and he always seems to be the cause.
A part of him, the old him, wants to reach out, to smooth things over. To say it’s okay, that this isn’t Yellow Eye’s fault, that Red Eye is going to be consumed by his demons anyway. He can feel their teeth sinking into his skin even now, a cold, sharp promise. But… when has Yellow Eye ever listened to anything Red Eye has said? The words would just be more fuel for the fire, more proof of his failure. So he says nothing, and lets the silence take the blame.
(And he doesn’t want this Yellow Eye to go, not really. Not when he’s the only real thing in the room, when he is one of the four corners of Red Eye’s entire world.)
“Right. That’s enough of that,” Yellow Eye says, his voice rough. “You’re going to sit down before you fall down.” His hand is on Red Eye’s arm, his grip firm but not rough, a line drawn between this world and the negated. Yellow Eye guides him towards the couch, and Red Eye moves without resistance, his body pliant, his mind still buzzing.
The moment he sits, the room convulses. The couch groans, rejecting his weight with a violent, angry protest. A wave of cold washes over Red Eye, so intense it feels like a physical blow. The ghost-Yellow Eye, the sharp, wounded echo, doesn't just vanish; it shrieks. A silent, psychic scream of rage that rips through Red Eye’s mind before being extinguished, leaving behind a ringing, painful void.
The space between them feels vast, charged with everything unsaid.
Red Eye can’t, he can’t-
There are hands in his hair, on his shoulders, and for a moment Red Eye panics as he remembers other hands. A thousand phantom hands. The cold, proprietary touch of photographers at a dozen shoots, their whispers about light and angles and the curve of his throat. The impersonal press of officials at pre-race weigh-ins, their gazes stripping him down to numbers. The grasping, adoring claws of fans at meet-and-greets, tearing him apart piece by piece under the shifting guise of love, then hate, then utter indifference. A thousand different ways of being owned, of being touched without being seen.
“You really are more trouble than you’re worth, aren’t you?”
Yellow Eye’s voice is a low grumble beside his ear, and the shock that goes through Red Eye is electric. He can tell, with a certainty that feels like a crack in the ice, that Yellow Eye is lying. The words are a flimsy shield, and the desperate, fierce truth beneath them is heartbreaking, hysterical. He wants to laugh, or maybe cry.
A hand guides his head, gently but firmly, until his temple rests against the solid warmth of Yellow Eye’s shoulder. The fabric of his team jacket is rough against his skin.
“We’re only doing this until White Eye arrives,” Yellow Eye mutters, a disclaimer that sounds more like a prayer.
Then, his voice changes. The performative annoyance drops away, replaced by something low, rhythmic, and ancient. Yellow Eye recites the next words rather than merely speaking them, and the Old Felynian syllables are a vibration that seems to bypass Red Eye's ears and settle directly in his battered soul.
“Ha-ek, ha-ek. Der-en-ee iss-fet, der-en-ee seh-ba-oo. Wed-jat em sa-ek.”
Neither of them believes in the old Gods, not really—not in the way their ancestors did. But it’s like believing in the sea; you don’t have to worship it to know its depths, to feel the pull of its tides in your blood. The protection hymn is an anchor, its frequency a legacy designed to cut through psychic noise.
The phantom hands vanish, and the weight of Yellow Eye’s fingers in his hair is all that remains. The air is no longer quite so heavy with judgment. Yellow Eye’s voice is a steady, protective drone in the dark, a sound that pushes back against the screaming silence in his own head.
The hymn fades. Red Eye keeps his eyes closed, his head still against Yellow Eye’s shoulder. He is exhausted, hollowed out, existing now as a dull, distant ache. The ghosts are not gone, only hushed, biding their time in the corners of the room.
They sit together in the almost quiet, and wait.